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As we know various Europeans have been trying it on with Google News. Arguing that their excerpts are breach of copyright for which Google must pay them hefty sums of money. Google is arguing both fair use and also that they're driving shedloads of traffic to the newspapers so please, do stop complaining. I may have simplified that somewhat.

But there's another case which could lead some to a different answer. This is the one where AP has sued Meltwater. Meltwater runs something very much akin to Google Alerts, or a clippings service if you prefer.AP claimed that the excerpts which it took from AP's work were too large to qualify under fair use. And the judge agreed with AP:

The judgement also points to the amount of content that Meltwater replicated. Whereas fair use allows anyone to reproduce a headline and snippets, Cote suggested Meltwater took “the heart” of the copyrighted work by also reproducing the “lede” and other sentences:

“A lede is a sentence that takes significant journalistic skill to craft. [It shows] the creativity and therefore protected expression involved with writing a lede and the skill required to tweak a reader’s interest.”

The ruling added that Meltwater had taken more of the story than was necessary for a search engine.....

That's the heart of the legal point being made. You can take so much but only so much before it becomes more than fair use. Quite how this applies legally I'm not sure but this next point is also interesting:

Cote’s rejection of Meltwater’s search engine argument was based in part on the “click-through” rate of its stories. Whereas Google News users clicked through to 56 percent of excerpted stories, the equivalent rate for Meltwater was 0.08 percent, according to figures cited in the judgement. Cote’s point was that Meltwater’s service doesn’t provide people with a means to discover the AP’s stories (like a search engine) — but instead is a way to replace them.

The implication being that if you're additive, driving traffic to the original site, then you're more likely to be considered fair use than if you are replacing traffic to said site.

This is of course a US judge ruling on US law. So the application to the European laws that govern Google's use of clippings from newspapers over there isn't directly addressed. But I would expect any such result to be broadly similar. If you're driving traffic to the sites and you're also only using a tiny piece of the original then you're almost certainly fair use. And we might also want to note that however much the various European newspaper groups have complained about Google News none of them has ever actually managed to get a court to agree with their whinings.